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A total team effort
Long before a pair of fifth-inning homers pushed the District 9 Majors final out of reach, West Springfield American Little League coach Gary Engle swelled with pride when he thought of how his team responded to an earlier loss and posted a 7-2 record throughout this annual All-Star tournament.After all, Engle preaches regularly to his kids that single -- even multiple -- events do not change baseball games. But the two homers, which didn't provide a game-winning margin or even a momentary lead change, did stake Woodbridge to a deflating 10-4 lead.
“It's never one play that changes a ballgame,” said Engle, whose team eventually dropped a 13-6 decision to Woodbridge. “It never comes down to one play when you really look at it, even though some of the kids take it hard.”
West Springfield first tangled with Woodbridge on July 8, dropping an 8-2 decision that meant a trip to the dreaded bottom half of the bracket. Engle's team responded with a win over Central Springfield on Friday to earn its shot at redemption.
Things appeared shaky early on Saturday, as West Springfield starting pitcher Nick Balenger (3.2 IP, 5 runs, 3 hits and 8 strikeouts) allowed a pair of runs to cross the plate in the first inning. But thanks to an RBI-double, which Will Harrison scorched down the left-field line, West Springfield countered with three runs in the bottom half of the frame to take the lead.
“We're always playing until the last out,” said Harrison, who had a busy day by going 2-for-3 with two RBIs, a homer, two runs scored and a walk. “It gets tough at times, but we're always fighting and we're always striving to do our best.”
West Springfield's second fight came in the third inning, when Balenger's (1-for-3, R, BB) sharply hit single up the middle brought Nick Tangora (2-for-4, RBI, R) around to score and West Springfield crept back to within one.
Balenger (below) continued to pile up the strikeouts -- eight of his 11 outs came via the punch out -- as he fanned the side in the fourth, though Woodbridge added another run on a wild pitch. But with the score set at 6-4, that pivotal -- or not so pivotal -- two-homer inning was about to occur.
The sequence read like this: home run, error, walk, home run, and the result became nothing but bad news. Harrison tried to neutralize what eventually became a five-run inning by going deep to start the fifth -- “I got a floating knuckleball up in the zone, and I just drove it,” he said -- but Engle's group couldn't mount one last charge.
“It was a tough competition in District 9 ... it always is,” said Engle, who led West Springfield American to a state title in 2005. “We knew it was going to be a tough road, and we were hoping to turn things around.”
West Springfield might not have turned things around enough to make it to the state tournament, which will begin this weekend with pool play and conclude next Wednesday with a final in Caroline County, but that didn't stop Engle's team from learning a valuable lesson -- something that's applicable both on and off the baseball diamond.
“I hope they remember that we win as a team and lose as a team,” Engle said. “We played them close for a few innings, they overcame us and we couldn't recover ... I couldn't be more proud of them though.”
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